Programs to accompany

Measuring Unemployment Insurance Generosity
Stephane Pallage, Lyle Scruggs, Christian Zimmermann
To appear in Political Analysis

Included files:

readme.txt:

This file

uk2tax.dat:

Calibration file with tax benefits

uk2.dat:

Calibration file without tax benefits

calib.dat:

Calibration file used in benchmark exercise

scruggs1b.f: 

FORTRAN77 program to run simulations

graphs.m:

Matlab program generating the figures.


HOW TO RUN SIMULATIONS

First, you need to compile the scruggs1b.f file with FORTRAN77. We used the g77 compiler included in the standard Linux distribution. It may run with other flavors of FORTRAN, but without guarantees. Our experience is that the following compiler flags are best for running this program:
g77 -O -W -ffixed-line-length-none -funroll-all-loops -o scruggs1b scruggs1b.f
For testing, the following command can be useful:
g77 -O -W -Wimplicit -Wuninitialized -Wsurprising -ffortran-bounds-check -ffixe
d-line-length-none -funroll-all-loops -o scruggs1b scruggs1b.f
On the shell, the following will start the simulation, sending messages to a log file:
./scruggs1b >log

The program takes the model calibration from a file named calib.dat. For the benchmark simulation, copy to calib.dat the file uk2tax.dat from which you remove the first line (which indicates columns headers for convenience). To run simulations with different calibrations, simply change the numbers in the file calib.dat and run again.

The output is written to a file named results2.test.  Rename this file before running another experiment. Note that depending on your computer, it may take a significant amount of time to compute the equilibrium, especially if your economy deviates significantly from the benchmark or is run for the first time. The program will also write files v1.test, v2.test, f1.test, and f2.test, which are the value and distribution function matrices for the complex and simple policies. To save time on the next simulation, rename the extensions from .test to .dat, uncomment the line in scruggs1b.f that read those files, comment (with ! at the start of the line) the lines that initialize matrices V1, V2, F1, and F2.


The file graphs.m has all the data to draw the graphs, therefore it also contains the results of our simulations. Use Matlab to draw the graphs, which are automatically saved in encapsulated PostScript files. 
